Building Something That Will Last
What We Can All Learn from Lauryn Hill, Michael Jackson, the Knicks, and Jay-Z About Building an Audience
My birthday is in 2 days, so I’ve decided for this week’s newsletter I’ll share some things I am decoding personally.
Last night I watched the BET Awards and the biggest moment for me was when they gave Lauryn Hill an award they created just for her. Not because she has a long discography. She has one album, The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill, released in 1998 and since then her relationship with the stage has been complicated. Late arrivals, cancellations, and no-shows became part of the public conversation about her over the years. However, BET decided to build a brand new award for her because what she gave people with that one album, 28 years ago, is still working in people’s lives today. They called it The Living Legend Icon Award, created for an artist who “mastered their craft and never let go of the culture.” The tribute lasted 20 minutes. Queen Latifah, SZA, Doechii, Doja Cat, Nas, Lizzo, Tems, Rapsody, Common, and her own children all took the stage.
I watched that and I couldn’t stop thinking: that’s what I want to build.
Again, this is my birthday week, the last year of my fifties. And watching that room stand for Lauryn Hill finally gave me the words for what’s been sitting with me all week.
I don’t want to build something successful. I want to build something that outlasts me.
Not “will this succeed?” I’ve been in the entertainment business for over 30 years. I know what success looks like. A show that gets made, a season that delivers, a network that calls back. I know how to do that.
But outlasting me is something else entirely. That’s about a relationship with an audience, a community, an idea, that is deep enough to survive my mistakes, my absence, and eventually, my death.
This week gave me four case studies in what that actually looks like.
👩🏾💻 LET’S DECODE THIS
Michael Jackson’s Audience Lives On. $960 Million Box Office Proves It.
Lauryn Hill Has One Album. Tonight BET Created an Award Just to Hold What She Built.
Two Million Knicks Fans Showed Up for the Parade that took 53 years to Earn.
Jay-Z’s Exhibit Had Lines Around the Block Despite His Conflict with the Culture.
Why What I Am Building Has to Be Deep Enough to Last
Michael Jackson’s Audience Lives On. $960 Million Box Office Proves It.
The Michael biopic is the highest-grossing music biopic ever made. $960 million worldwide. A bigger opening weekend than Oppenheimer. And Michael Jackson has been dead for 17 years.
He has been the subject of documentaries that made damaging allegations, years of public debate, and ongoing legal battles over his estate. None of it moved his audience but the film, directed by Antoine Fuqua and released April 24, 2026, opened to $97 million domestically and $218.8 million globally. The biggest opening weekend in the history of biographical films.
Nearly 20 years after his death.
Here’s what that number actually tells you: an audience that builds a real relationship with a creator doesn’t dissolve when the creator is gone. It waits. It carries the connection forward. And when someone gives them a reason to show up, even decades later, even in the middle of unresolved controversy, they do.
The entertainment industry treats audiences as a metric. Ratings, streams, ticket sales. All of it measured by what an audience does right now. What almost never gets analyzed is the depth of the relationship underneath the number. How many of those $960 million in tickets were bought by people who remember exactly where they were when Thriller dropped? How many bought tickets because Michael Jackson’s music was the soundtrack to a specific moment in their life that they still carry?
That’s not a viewership number. That’s a relationship. And relationships built on something real don’t expire.
Building an audience is not the same as building a relationship with an audience. Reach is a number but relationship is a depth you can’t manufacture in a campaign. You build it over time, through the quality of what you give people and how consistently you give it.
Lauryn Hill Has One Album. Last night BET Created an Award Just to Hold What She Built.
Lauryn Hill has one studio album. The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill, released in 1998. Twenty-eight years ago. Over the years she performed, but those performances came with their own complications. Late arrivals. Cancellations. No-shows that became part of the public conversation about her. Not a clean legacy and definitely not an easy relationship with her fans.
But last night BET gave her a 20-minute tribute and an award they had to invent because the ones they already had weren’t big enough to hold what she represents.
One album. A complicated relationship with the stag and they created a new category just to describe her.
Here’s what that tells you: volume is not the point. Consistency is not always the point. What Lauryn Hill gave people on that one album was so specific, so true, so rooted in the dignity and complexity of Black women’s experience, that it has never stopped working in people’s lives. In her acceptance speech last night she said: “I have always cared about the expression and the representation of the dignity of our people.” That care is what the audience felt and that care is what kept them standing with her even during the hard times.
You don’t need a full discography. You need to give people something true enough that they want to continue to carry it.
Two Million Knicks Fans Showed Up for the Parade it took the Team 53 years to Earn.
The New York Knicks won the NBA championship this year. Their first since 1973. Fifty-three years and two million people showed up for the parade. It ranked among the largest championship celebrations in sports history.
Think about what that actually means. Multiple generations of Knicks fans never saw a championship. Children grew up, had children of their own, and watched those children grow up, all without a title. They watched the franchise make bad trades, bad hires, bad decisions for five decades. They had every reason to redirect their loyalty to a team that was actually winning.
But they didn’t.
The Knicks never stopped being the Knicks. Madison Square Garden is still the mecca. New York City still claims that team in a way that goes beyond wins and losses. The relationship wasn’t built on performance. It was built on identity. On what it means to be from New York, to love New York, to believe New York deserves something.
The fans didn’t stay because the team earned it every year. They stayed because the relationship was about something larger than the scoreboard.
Your audience will tolerate a bad season. What they won’t tolerate is the feeling that you stopped being who they came to you to be. The Knicks were frustrating, imperfect, and undeniably themselves for 53 years. As long as that core identity held, the audience held with it.
What is the thing about your work that is so specifically, undeniably yours that your audience would wait 53 years to see it win?
Jay-Z’s Exhibit Had Lines Around the Block Despite His Conflict with the Culture.
This is the most complex example this week. And the most instructive.
Reasonable Doubt turned 30 on June 25. Roc Nation launched the JAŸ-Z30 celebration: pop-ups in Manhattan, DUMBO and at the Brooklyn Public Library, a commemorative library card, Yankee Stadium shows in July. When I visited the exhibit this past weekend, there were people lined up for blocks. His concerts are selling out.
At the same time, Jay-Z just partnered with Target to sell a 30th anniversary Reasonable Doubt vinyl, during the ongoing Black consumer boycott of Target over their DEI rollbacks. In 2019, he partnered with the NFL during the community boycott following the league’s blackballing of Colin Kaepernick. Both decisions drew real, significant criticism from within the Black community.
The debate is real.
The criticism is real.
The lines at the exhibit are real.
The sellouts are real.
This is not a contradiction. This is what a brand built over 30 years of genuine creative output looks like when it gets stress-tested. The audience doesn’t disappear. They show up and debate you at the same time.
Jay-Z built Roc-A-Fella Records in 1995 because no major label would sign him on his terms. He built the structure first, owned what he created, and for 30 years he gave his audience music that meant something specific to them. Music about Marcy Projects, about the streets of New York, about ambition and survival and making it on your own terms. That relationship has weight and it has history. Nor does it evaporate because of a business decision the community disagrees with.
Does that mean he gets a pass? That’s not for me to say. That’s a community conversation. What I can say is this: the depth of the relationship is what creates the space for that conversation to happen publicly, loudly, and still have people standing in line.
Building something that lasts doesn’t mean building something controversy-proof. It means building a relationship deep enough that your audience stays in the room even when they’re angry. The test of a real brand is not how it performs when everything is going well. It’s what the audience does in the complex moments.
Watch what they do. Not what they say.
Why What I Am Building Has to Be Deep Enough to Last.
TV Decoded exists because I love to learn. I always have. And I have never been able to sit on what I’ve learned when I know someone else needs it.
I have negotiated IP ownership. I have been told my terms were “unprecedented.” Being Bobby Brown was the first. Bravo in 2004 was a new platform, a window of leverage I recognized before they did. I secured IP ownership on a show that, by every structural design of that industry, I was not supposed to own. They made me sign an NDA. What that NDA was actually protecting was information. The knowledge that it was possible. The leverage it would give the next creator to ask for the same thing.
Then I built Tv Decoded so I can share this type of information
The people I am building this for are creators from underrepresented communities. The people whose stories fill every screen in this country, who drive viewership and cultural conversation, who are still in 2026 the least likely to own the IP of the work they create. That is not an accident. It is a system. And the only way to dismantle a system is to be more transparent about how it works.
So this week, as I am turning 59 and watching Lauryn Hill get that tribute, watching the Michael Jackson numbers, the Knicks parade, the lines at the Jay-Z exhibit, all of it is making me ask a harder question than “am I building something?”
The harder question is: Am I building something with enough depth that it outlasts me?
Is the relationship I’m building with the creators who read this newsletter built on something real enough that it survives the moments when I get it wrong? When the industry shifts and some of my frameworks need updating? When I’m no longer here to explain it? I think the answer is yes, if I stay true to the mission. The mission is not about me. It’s about the information. The transparency. The knowledge the industry spent decades suppressing. That knowledge doesn’t expire when I do. If it’s documented, archived, and passed forward, it will compound.
And just so you know I’m not building it alone. Part of what I’m being intentional about at 59 is bringing the right people into this space. Entertainment attorneys who can speak to contract language in plain terms. CPAs who understand the specific financial realities of creative careers. Folks from the SBA who know what resources actually exist for independent creators building businesses. The knowledge creators from underrepresented communities need doesn’t live in just one person, it lives in a network and I’m building that network into this platform.
That’s what I’m building. Not content. An archive. Knowledge working in the world for creators who deserve it, long after I’m done creating.
And at 59, I’m more intentional about that than I have ever been.
📓 THE PLAYBOOK
Three moves to consider:
Give people something true, not just something polished.
Lauryn Hill didn’t get a 20-minute tribute because The Miseducation was perfectly produced. She got it because it was honest in a way that made people feel seen. Michael Jackson’s audience didn’t generate $960 million in ticket sales because of a marketing campaign. They showed up because of something real they’d been carrying for decades. The question isn’t “is this good?” It’s “is this true?” True is what people carry. Good is what they forget.
Stay undeniably yourself, especially when results don’t come.
The Knicks were bad for 53 years. They never stopped being the Knicks. That identity, frustrating and imperfect as it was, is what held the audience. Your audience will leave if you become someone else chasing what’s working for everyone else. They will wait through your bad seasons if you stay who you are. Figure out what is undeniably, specifically yours and protect it even when the scoreboard doesn’t reflect it yet.
Own the structure before you need the archive.
Jay-Z built Roc-A-Fella at 26. The exhibit celebrating him at 56 exists because he owned what he created from the beginning. Whatever you’re building now - the newsletter, the course, the body of work, the knowledge in your head, document it, own it, build the infrastructure around it. The structure you build today is what holds your legacy when you’re not there to defend it. BET invented a new award for Lauryn Hill. Your archive should be built so that when the moment comes to celebrate what you made, you own what they’re celebrating.
YOUR MOVE THIS WEEK
Think about one relationship you have with your audience, or the audience you’re still building, that is about something deeper than what you last produced.
What do people carry from your work that they’d still carry five years after you stopped making it?
If the answer isn’t clear, that’s the work. Not the next piece of content. The depth of the connection underneath it.
WHAT I’M WATCHING
The MJ estate as the cautionary tale inside the success story. The biopic is approaching $960 million. It’s also generating active litigation between Paris Jackson and estate executors over who controls the narrative and the money. The audience relationship is thriving. The ownership infrastructure is contested. The audience stayed. The question is who controls the archive they came back for.
Jay-Z’s Target situation as a live case study. The debate about his decision to partner with Target during the boycott is real and ongoing. His Yankee Stadium shows are selling out at the same time. I’m watching whether the Target deal changes the composition of the audience that shows up, or whether the depth of 30 years holds. The answer will tell us something specific about where loyalty actually lives.
What I’m building in the last year of my fifties - TV Decoded is an archive in progress. What I’m watching is whether the knowledge I’m documenting is deep enough, specific enough, and true enough to keep working in the world when I’m no longer the one publishing it. That’s the only metric that matters to me right now.
IF THIS WAS VALUABLE
This is my birthday week. I’m turning 59. And the most meaningful thing I could receive right now is knowing that the knowledge being built here is reaching the people who need it.
If TV Decoded has given you something useful , a framework, a way of seeing a deal differently, a piece of information you didn’t have access to before I’m asking you to become a founding member this week. Not for me. For the next creator who reads this and finally understands what they can ask for.
We have 10 founding members. I want to double that this month.
SHARE THIS
If this newsletter made you think about what you’re building, share it with one creator who needs to hear it.
“Build the relationship deep enough that your audience stays in the room even when they’re angry. That’s not a fan base. That’s a legacy.” — Tracey Baker-Simmons
You are most definitely building something that will outlast you! I learn so much from you every week and I love seeing the work you get into! Thank your for sharing your expertise and time with us, you're inspiring the people behind you!
Man I have this Lauryn Hill debate with my peers all the time. I'm like you can't name me another album that holds up to that type revelation. I was kid when it first came out so I didn't understand what she was talking about but listening to it now as an adult , it is the definition of a gem. It's a life giving album. I'm very interested to see and rooting for what you are about to do Tracey! Have a Happy Birthday!!